“Too many choices hurt sales” is one of the most repeated findings in marketing. It comes from one elegant field experiment. The evidence since then is more interesting and more useful than the slogan.

The jam study

In 2000, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting table at Draeger’s, an upscale supermarket in Menlo Park, California, showing either 24 jams or 6. The large display drew more people: 60% of passersby stopped, against 40%. But of those who stopped, 3% bought a jar at the large display and nearly 30% at the small one Published.

The meta-analyses

A decade later, Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder and Peter Todd pooled 63 conditions from 50 published and unpublished experiments with 5,036 participants. They found “a mean effect size of virtually zero but considerable variance between studies” Published. On average, more options didn’t reduce choosing or satisfaction, and several attempts to reproduce overload effects hadn’t found them.

Then Alexander Chernev, Ulf Böckenholt and Joseph Goodman analyzed 99 observations covering 7,202 participants and asked when overload happens rather than whether it does on average. They identified four conditions that reliably make it more likely: a complex set of options, a difficult decision task, a chooser who is unsure what they want, and a goal of minimizing effort. With those taken into account, they found the overall effect of assortment size on overload was significant, “a finding counter to the data reported by prior meta-analytic research” Published.

So the honest summary: choice overload is not a law, and the jam result is not a typical effect. It’s a real effect that shows up under specific conditions and vanishes under others.

What it means for a DTC range

Chernev’s conditions sort your customers for you.

• New visitors are often unsure what they want. That’s where overload can bite. Help them without cutting anything: a clear best seller, a starter set, a page that narrows by need.
• Repeat customers know what they want. A long range doesn’t overload them, because they aren’t choosing; they’re reordering. What hurts them is their product disappearing. Give them a one-tap reorder (Used, Not Bought covers making reorder the easy path) and leave their product alone.
• Near-identical variants make the set more complex for everyone and help nobody. These are the duplicates from chapter 10, and they’re where cutting pays.

Solve choice overload for new visitors with curation. Don’t solve it by removing a regular’s product.

How to test a product page change for new visitors, and whether your traffic can carry the test, is in The Honest Test.

Do this

• Look at your collection pages as a first-time visitor and count the products that differ only in a way you’d need to explain. Those are candidates for merging. Then check that every repeat customer can reorder in two taps from the account page or their last email.